Stunningly beautiful video makes San Francisco’s fog look like something out of a fairy tale

Since I live about 3,000 miles from San Francisco, my main experience with the city’s iconic fog has been reading wry tweets to and from its Twitter account (@KarlTheFog). I didn’t realize how much I’d come to think of the fog as a pun-loving mischief-maker until I watched Adrift, a “love letter to the fog of the San Francisco Bay Area” that shows a whole different side of the famous weather pattern. It’s like Karl just took off his glasses and let down his hair. Why, Mr. The Fog, you’re GORGEOUS!

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The video was made by photographer Simon Christen, who acknowledges that he had to work to make Karl look this good:

The weather conditions have to be just right for the fog to glide over the hills and under the bridge. I developed a system for trying to guess when to make the drive out to shoot, which involved checking the weather forecast, satellite images and webcams multiple times a day. For about 2 years, if the weather looked promising, I would set my alarm to 5am, recheck the webcams, and then set off on the 45-minute drive to the Marin Headlands.

I spent many mornings hiking in the dark to only find that the fog was too high, too low, or already gone by the time I got there. Luckily, once in a while the conditions would be perfect and I was able to capture something really special. Adrift is a collection of my favorite shots from these excursions into the ridges of the Marin Headlands.

All that effort more than paid off. It’s just pictures of fog, but no joke, this video almost moved me to tears. Karl, who knew you had such hidden depths?